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More Down Yonder

• Down Yonder: Feelin’ froggy
• Down Yonder: Are we aware enough to learn from the past?
• Down Yonder: Enjoying the Floridays

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The shudder started in his lower spine.

It raced up his back to his shoulders and reached the inner part of his brain where dread and worry rule.

There it was. There was no mistaking it. Splashes or ripples on the pond can sometimes be deceiving. You think they’re one thing when they’re really a turtle or an anhinga.

But there it was, swimming lazily in the middle of the pond, aided slightly by the northern breeze.

It was four to five feet long. Its body skated effortlessly on top of the water behind its triangular head which it held a couple of inches above the surface. It was a bad guy, no doubt about it.

He knew it was a moccasin. It couldn’t have been any other kind of snake. And it was too close, way too close to his house.

Regaining his composure only slightly, he watched with a combination of fear and fascination as the moccasin casually drifted from one side of the pond to the other. He watched as it slid closer to his side of the shore and felt some relief as it floated back across.

The last he saw of the snake was on the opposite side of the shore. But he saw it lots of places over the next couple of days, at least he was afraid he would see it.

“Once that snake fear gets hold of you, it’s hard to get away from, ain’t it?” said an old woman who had been watching the younger man’s dance of dread from a few feet away. “You’ll be seein’ that rascal everywhere for a while, even in your own house,” she told him. “That’s just the way it goes with snake fear. You tend to see ’em all over the place once you’ve been rattled — so to speak.”

But this wasn’t a rattlesnake, the young man thought. This wasn’t even a gator. A gator he can live with in his pond, even appreciate.

And a rattlesnake will at least warn you to back away before he strikes and more often than not, the snake will take every opportunity to back away himself.

But the moccasin knows no such discretion. You get in his territory and you’re the one in trouble, not him. If he decides your yard or pond is his territory, that’s it, period. No discussions.

“Floridians been livin’ with that kind of snake fear ever since humankind intruded on this paradise,” the old woman said. “The water, the swamps, the woods, they’re all just a natural snake heaven.

“The chambers of commerce don’t like to talk about ‘em much ‘cause it tends to scare away the northerners with money in their pockets but it’s hard to live for long in Florida without runnin’ into one of them reptiles. You just get used to ‘em and even come to realize than many of ‘em actually serve a useful purpose here and there.

“I remember as a youngster goin’ out to my granddaddy’s barn one day to play and there, lyin’ stretched out along the barn was the biggest, longest snake I’d ever seen.

“He took one look at me and shot like a rocket into a lead pipe my granddaddy had stashed along the side of the barn.

“That didn’t make no difference to me, though. I didn’t go into the barn that day and stayed away from it for several days after that. Even right up to the time when my granddaddy died and we sold his barn, I always kept a sharp eye peeled and a light step in my foot whenever I went into that barn.”

The young man didn’t rest comfortably for a couple of days after the cottonmouth ventured too close. It wasn’t that he had never seen moccasins before. He had. But before, he’d usually seen them from the safety of a canoe when they were draped peaceably over a low-hanging tree limb at the edge of the river. He didn’t like the fact that one of those rascals might actually be hangin’ around his neighborhood. But it happens. This is Florida. One gets used to it.

“It’s that snake fear,” the old woman said. “It’ll hang around for a while.”